


A Cavern Was His Dwelling

by Whreflections



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Cannibalism, M/M, Murder Husbands, Psychological Torture, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-03
Updated: 2019-11-03
Packaged: 2021-01-21 03:42:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21293057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whreflections/pseuds/Whreflections
Summary: The best journalists go where the leads take them- and Hunter Collins is doing his best to be a good journalist.Unfortunately, the lead he chose to follow happened to be the disappearance of Hannibal Lecter, and the location of Will Graham's body.He would have been better served to ask fewer questions, and let the dust die down until the leads were buried in the settling.The mystery of Will Graham's body was one he could have done without solving
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 9
Kudos: 97
Collections: RAVAGE - An Infernal Hannibal Anthology





	A Cavern Was His Dwelling

**Author's Note:**

> It’s so strange to finally be posting this, so long after I wrote it. At the time that I did, I was super nervous about it being good- and when I went back and read it months later I was startled to discover how much I liked it.
> 
> I hope you all enjoy it, and that those of you who have Ravage already have been enjoying it :D

The picture was blurry, trailing at the edges with the movement of the photographer’s hand. This alone would have added a touch of uncertainty, but the sea of faces and backs that made up the image made it harder, still. There were men and women on phones, men carrying bags, women carrying flowers. There were two cars, a newspaper vendor’s stall. A street dog, raised up on her hind legs to tug at a package balanced so precariously on the edge of a trash can it might well have been left as an intentional offering. There was action everywhere; the face Hunter had circled could have easily been lost in it.

For the unaware, surely it would have, but Abril Alvarez was not among them. She’d had her eyes open, and she’d seen something she couldn’t forget—or at least, she’d been certain she had. Hunter would have been less certain, perhaps, if turning the picture in to the local government hadn’t been the last anyone had heard of her for over a year.

On paper, there were few reasons for suspicion—she had been looking for work, at the time; there was nothing substantial for her to leave behind. Nothing to stop her from leaving the country, and moving to Spain, where she’d spent time at university. Her disappearance was a non-event- both to the police, who had come to distrust her picture, and to the neighbors who had barely noticed her replacement with a new tenant.

For Hunter, the story and the image that came with it had been enough to draw him out of Brasil, to a town in the mountains in Argentina, and beyond to Uruguay and Chile. In the midst of city bustle, in a cell phone picture blurred by evening light and fear, he could see what Abril had. He could see what she’d died for.

Hannibal Lecter, his hair grown long and drawn back, the sharp lines of his face softened by the scruff of a greying beard.

Even at a distance, there was something alien about his eyes, a dark and certain knowing. He had seen her take the picture, or he’d suspected; when it was printed in the paper her anonymity hadn’t mattered. He’d found her anyway. More than likely, he’d followed her home that very night.

The focus on his face made even the cheery street image sinister somehow, a pit to draw the eye like the center of a storm. In contrast, the image Hunter had laid alongside it carried no malice, no chill behind the faint tinge of sadness. It had been given to him by Will Graham’s wife, a glimpse into the window of time Jack Crawford’s wonder had been given without the taint of Hannibal cast over it. In it, he knelt in the snow, his hand buried in the fur of a setter pointing into the pines. There was frost on the air from their mingled breath, a smile on his face, his hands red from the cold.

In the jarringly cheery wine cellar Hunter had woken up in months past the use of those pictures in his blog, it was strange, perhaps, how easily they wove their way back to the forefront of his mind, burning behind his eyes. It was, perhaps, the contrast that seared them in so strongly—the alien nature Hannibal had held in the crowd was little like the reality of the man before him.

Hannibal had entered the room without fanfare—soundless and calm, his footsteps sure. Somewhere else, with better words and more time to find them, Hunter would have called it _presence_. Presence, and, perhaps, indifference—everywhere else, at least, but in the very deepest pits of his eyes, where flashes of something could be seen, like flickers in the depths of a lake that might be scales or might be shell or might be something monstrous moving within the deep currents.

Hunter could remember three times at least that he had seen him, and the meetings blurred together—quiet steps preceding the strains of an aria, a prick to the inside of his elbow, a pain in his back. When he was aware, it was as if in the midst of a terrible paralysis, the world around him too vivid, his body full of feeling but unable to answer his calls.

The terror of Lecter, in person, was not his strangeness, but his normalcy—the surreal truth of feeling his own body bound, alongside the smooth movements and pitch perfect hum of a man now clean shaven but with elegantly tied long hair, shirtsleeves rolled up and apron fastened, expertly cutting the fat from an organ he manipulated across a butcher’s block with his bare hands.

"Suet crust steak and kidney pie is a hearty dish, suitable for the season," Hannibal said, the timbre of voice low, and warm, and carrying. He hadn’t even looked up. "Made from the fat around the loins and kidneys of sheep and cattle, suet was often invaluable for those who needed to supplement calories with less food to eat, or those with a need to endure the cold.”

He might have been a chef at work; he might have been a father. Instead, Hunter could feel the pain in his back, deep and sharp, and he knew the truth, with a certainty that should have filled his mouth with bile.

There was a kidney on the butcher’s block, but it wasn’t a lamb’s.

He knew, and still his mind shied away from it, back and back, flashing like a skipping stone—the curiosity about the legends of warlocks that had led him to Chile’s coast, the months spent in Uruguay chasing a lead on Hannibal Lecter that might not have been a lead, the picture in Brasil that had led him to one of his most popular blog posts to date.

_Where is Will Graham’s body?_

It was the end of months of his own personal introspection and consideration, a partial rebuttal to Freddie Lounds’ popular interpretation that Graham despite all he’d sacrificed in the past to bring Hannibal to justice had gone willingly with him over the edge. From the beginning, from the moment he’d first snuck onto the property where the Tooth Fairy had died and taken a picture of the jagged rocks below the cliff, Hunter had been certain of at least one thing—

If Graham survived the fall, he wouldn’t survive it long.

Inevitably, he would try to escape. Lecter’s attempts at conditioning would fail, or slip, or Will Graham would simply find a way to escape his bounds. However it happened, he would leave, and it would only be a matter of time before he sought asylum, or turned up dead and half eaten, his vivid brain on display, perhaps, in the way Hannibal decided suited him best.

It could be argued that in posting it, Hunter had wanted more than to refute Lounds.

He’d sought his own notoriety, sure, but Hunter had heard, too, that no matter how hard he tried to elevate himself in other respects, Lecter was just as vulnerable to his own press as any other serial killer. He could not argue, now that he’d ended up here, that flushing Lecter out hadn’t been at least a part of what he wanted.

He could, too, see the utter foolishness of it, now. Lecter was not a bird to flush; Will had never caught him that way.

He had only ever been caught by an expert fisherman, with a hook baited with the very fisherman himself, drawn straight through his own spine. In his studies of the case, Hunter had always thought the damage was largely physical, and partly for show. Demonstrative, and chosen for the worth of the catch, not the worth of the chase—and certainly not the rush of release, not with the nature of the predator he'd set out to land. 

The moment Will came into focus from the shadows along the opposite wall, Hunter knew just how wrong he'd been. This man was a fisherman, yes, and he'd been pierced, but he was no passive bait, and he was no captive. There was no fear in him; no deference—he approached Lecter with the ease of an equal, a mirroring fluidity in his motions. His sleeves were rolled to the same length; the same muscles flexed in his forearms when he came to lean against the opposite side of the butcher's block. Where Lecter's face was smooth he sported a beard, as tidy as the curls of his hair were wild. 

Their eyes met over the piece of his body laid out between them, and the inexplicably sudden rush of fear in Hunter's chest was so strong he nearly passed out. 

“My father used to put suet cake out, for the woodpeckers,” Will said, light, and soft, chased with wine he swirled before drinking, but did not sniff. The glass had been Lecter's, waiting half drunk on the table. Graham drained it. “We mostly got starlings.”

“From what you’ve told me of your father, I doubt this deterred him.”

“Not in the slightest; he called it ‘feeding the hungry’,” Will said. His smile was in his words, and his mouth, and his eyes, which were locked still to Lecter's. The warmth was genuine, and targeted, and Hunter felt only an unstoppable chill. Behind him, even the cheery crackle of the fire seemed ominous, absent of heat, capable only of throwing strange shadows across the space between his chair and the racks and the butcher's block. From the corner of his eye, he could see hanging sheets of plastic, and he knew at some point he'd been behind them, knew he would be there again. Whether they were clean of blood or not, even if he'd been able to turn his head, he wouldn't have been able to bring himself to look. 

"Is our guest joining us for dinner?"

"You could ask him," Hannibal said, separating the last portion of fat with a deft twist of his blade. "He's been awake, here and there. We were discussing his research before you came down. I'm not sure he remembers."

In snatches, perhaps, but nothing Hunter could hold—words, and images, and the faint scent of blood and antiseptic mingled with unfamiliar cologne.

"There are striking similarities between the imbunche and the false prophets of the malebolge. Both are associated with magic, and both in the end are left with their view permanently distorted, facing always behind them. They must either stagger back, or walk forward blind."

_Imbunche_. 

The word rang heavy in Hunter's mind, the ramping noise of its repetition near deafening. His chest filled with the force of a scream he couldn't release, pressing hard enough against his lungs to drive his breath faster. He had been a voracious devourer of stories that fascinated him for as long as he could remember; he had read of imbunche long before he came here, long before he learned more. He had seen depictions of the creatures themselves; the horror of their gaping mouths and twisted bodies had dizzied him a little even in a library hundreds of miles from here. 

He carried, now, the curse of knowledge. Not knowing what Lecter was going to do with him had been a torment of its own. Whether it was worse than this, Hunter couldn’t be sure. Despite his chemical paralysis, he would feel the breaking of his leg, the contorting of it, the cut made into his back to insert his foot. He would feel the splitting of his tongue. He would feel—at least for some time, depending on Lecter’s authenticity—the unnatural bending of his neck, until it could bend no more. 

From the butcher’s block, Will’s voice carried, well into discussion before the rampant static in Hunter’s mind quieted enough to let him hear. 

"—aware of his fallacies or not, a false prophet sets himself up for failure. You could argue that what happens to him in the malebolge is poetic justice.”

“Just so.”

“The imbunche is innocent—“

“When he begins, not when he ends, not if the stories are to be believed,” Hannibal countered, gentle. He looked down only long enough to clean his hands on his apron, came up again to take the open wine bottle, and pour once more into the glass. “He is innocent as an infant, inarguably, but as his body is corrupted, so is his mind. He is a literal manifestation of the shaping of a soul by environment and influence—by the time his transformation is complete, he will guard the warlock’s cavern willingly, even doing magic of his own to defend it, if he’s able. Is his defense of those who raised him an act of evil, or an act of protection?” 

In taking the wine, Lecter swirled the glass, and sniffed it, and sipped, taking only a touch. 

“That would depend on your definition of evil. I would call it…an act of survival.” Will’s eyebrows rose, a question in his gaze Hunter could not understand. Even with his breath steady, even with his vision no longer prickling at the edges, he was sure he would not have understood. “Participation. Loyalty. An understanding that…he has nowhere else to go. Who would take him?” 

“An act of trust, then, that the one who made him will never turn him away,” Hannibal murmured, thick with fondness. “An imperfect solution that leaves neither alone in the dark.” 

Hunter could feel his cheeks growing wet, tears seeping from his eyes. There was a form of abject horror in their perfect concert—something had passed between them, then, and they’d both moved, but even in stepping away from each other, they seemed no less connected. 

Lecter passed out of Hunter’s vision, while Will came further into it, his eyes no longer tracking Lecter—as if the awareness of him had settled deeper in the last few moments, as if he could sense him through his very skin. In his approach Will’s silence was full of a different kind of menace than Lecter’s had been—as he had when he had watched Graham emerge from the shadows like a panther from the canopy, his overriding thought past even the continued distant panic about his fate was to marvel at how badly he had judged.

In his defense, however, the papers had never photographed Graham like this, and Molly certainly had never given him anything that hinted at it. The majority of the pictures Hunter had seen had shown him vulnerable, or they had shown him unhinged. They had featured Will Graham the family man pulled out of retirement, and Will Graham the victim. Freddie Lounds had covered Will Graham the killer, but none of them, not even Freddie, had done justice to the rich depth of chilling cunning, and the strange, glittering lust he could see in this man.

There was no doubt that he looked at Hunter and saw Hannibal’s final vision—his own form of imbunche, layered with his disdain at Hunter’s predictions. The truth of his fallacy was in Will’s every move, in the way he’d drunk Hannibal’s wine like it belonged to him. 

Between his legs, Hunter felt his pants go damp, piss soaking onto the seat and dripping from the planks of the chair where he was bound fast. If he’d had the ability to recognizably cry beyond the slow tracks on his cheeks, the gut wrenching twist of fear and shame and pure sickness surely would have brought him to it, but there was no sound coming from his throat; no movement from this throat at all save the reflex of his breath, and hammering of his heart. He had never been so aware of the movement of his blood under his skin as he was now, knowing it would soon be flowing out of it. He held no illusions, here. Short of a miracle, he would not be leaving here alive.

The sound that left Graham’s chest as he surveyed the mess Hunter had made might have been comfort, if there was any of the warmth he’d reserved for Lecter in it.

“I’d ask if Freddie Lounds put you up to this and got you into this, but—“ Graham’s head shook slowly, his dark curls shifting. In the low light, there was something inhuman about his odd beauty, scarred and ragged but no less present. “—I know you really got yourself into this, didn’t you, Hunter?” 

Arguably, he had. It wasn’t a comfort, now.

“ ‘Where is Will Graham’s body?’ You were sure you’d find it—or you wanted Hannibal to lead you to it, or spur him into killing me. Both would have gotten you the best headlines.” There was, there, more than a touch of disdain. Hunter could hear it even over the rushing of his blood.

“Do you see it, now?” Graham whispered, solid and sharp. “Do you _see_?”

His fingers traced the line of the scar on his cheek that started high, and dove down to disappear behind the dark brush of his beard, then followed up to a mark near his hair line. Coming down, he opened his shirt, letting it gape to show his shoulder, and the pucker of scarred skin that gave it definition. Lower, Hunter could see the curve of a line on his belly, briefly touched on the withdraw of his hand by the pads of Will’s fingers.

“All of it, everything you see—it’s Hannibal. It’s all Hannibal. And if you had the chance to look at him…” Graham’s mouth crooked up, pulling in the direction of his scar. “There’s pieces of me everywhere. We are…embedded in each other. Riddled with shrapnel. Neither of us are whole, not separately, not anymore.”

“I had considered having you print a retraction, at first.” From behind him, without a frame of reference Hannibal’s voice seemed to drift from out of nowhere, laced through with the soft sounds of the fire, and unsteady cadence of Hunter’s own breath. “In the end, we decided it would be best to make a statement of our own.” From the corner of his eye, Hannibal came into view again, the sharp edge of a small blade glinting with fire in his hand. “Retractions are so rarely read.”

Will stood from where he’d crouched to bare his chest, and Hannibal met him in the middle, easing him to his feet with a hand in his hair, the hand that the scalpel sliding under Will’s shirt. They kissed as if Will wasn’t feeling the blade— and maybe he wasn’t; from his angle, Hunter couldn’t see to be certain. There was only the firelight to illuminate their embrace, cast in a shifting web of shadows, their kiss long and deep and practiced—a kiss of lovers, not strangers.

A kiss for show would have been less frightening.

The terror rose too sharp to bear, and Hunter closed his eyes, opened them again with the wet sound of their kissing paused. He was just in time to see Will dropping to crouch before him again, his hands coming to rest on Hunter’s knees. He looked up, looking past him. 

“It took months to turn an imbunche’s head,” Will said, an incongruous playfulness in eyes. There wasn’t enough air; not in Hunter’s lungs, not in the whole cellar. 

“We agreed he is not an imbunche. Only a false prophet, found out.” Hannibal’s hands cradled his head, one curved under his chin, the other cupping the back of his skull. 

Graham’s head inclined. The fire was in his eyes, looking up—at his creator, perhaps. Hunter didn’t know; he never would. 

“Go on, then, Dr. Lecter. Show me.” 

Hunter squeezed his eyes shut.

=====

Beauty, art, and rhythm could always, at their deepest components, be reduced to math, and space. From the golden ratio and the rule of thirds to quarter rests and stage blocking, distance and calculation were ever at the heart of art, a seemingly incongruous logical backbone fitting seamlessly into the pursuits that by their very nature required the most heart.

Nothing truly moving could come without pause—a sacrifice had to be made, either to distance or time.

For the greatest grains, the most magnificent final images, it wasn’t beyond reason that a toll must be paid to both.

Hannibal had lived years without Will, separated from him both by miles and interminable minutes. By the very laws of the universe, he had earned the masterpiece lying beside him, now.

In his time at the hospital in Baltimore, Hannibal had sketched from memory, with the tools they would allow him. In living with Will, he’d come to learn, now, that Will’s body was as much an anomaly as his mind—he had never been able to hold Will in his mind palace, and he couldn’t hold his body, either, not in the way he held the Ponte Vecchio.

A hundred times, perhaps, he’d drawn Will laid out beside him in sleep, and no two of those sketches were the same, varying in more than the play of light and shadow, the wrinkle of sheets beneath his hands. There was something indefinable about him that could not be retained, only captured, fleetingly, at moments he allowed by the very act of sleeping untroubled alongside his artist.

At a distance of less than six inches from his hip, Hannibal could look down and see every detail of Will’s hand, the curve of his fingers, the places where his palms and the undersides of his fingers had roughed from tools and rope and fishing line. Near the heel of his hand there was a scar, white and thin, a faded half-inch tear he told Hannibal had come from a puppy he’d had as a teenager. Along the webbing of his thumb there was a smaller mark, older still, a rip made on the point of a hook long ago when his fingers were too clumsy to tie flies though he was already eager to try.

Hannibal had captured these, before; he could find them in his sketchbook if he looked.

In this moment, the differences were held in the curl of his fingers, and the faded blood under his nails (Hannibal’s own; if he rolled his shoulders, he could still feel the sting), and the space where for months, still, there had been a last hint of separation.

His ring finger bore a tan line, evidence of the band he’d taken off just last night. The ring rested, now, snugly in Hunter Collins’ palm, fingers tucked tight to hold it, wrist stitched tighter still against the jut of his shoulder blade. It would grow cold in the cocoon of his body long before it would be found.

Not the traditional imbunche, perhaps, and not solely the punishment of a seer, either. The form he had taken had, instead, been a melding of form and function, a creature of their own design.

The papers would wonder aloud—some with more intentional irony than others—where was the body of Hunter Collins?

They would not find him. Not, at least, for years and years, not until there was nothing left here to hide. A reverse of the old tales, in a sense, with the magic protected with the cavern (or, in this case, above it) safe only so long as the guardian slept undisturbed.

Someday, however, in a year or ten or fifty, the cave within the cliff below the house that used to hold such magic would be found, and entered, and there would be no missing Hunter Collins, then.

His body stood supported, left hand pierced at the wrist for stability through the point of one of the shaper stalactites. He had been freshly dead; the blood had run, and glistened, though it would soon enough be cleaned by the little scuttling, rustling creatures that made up the floors and walls of dark places when no one was there to shine a light and disrupt their dominion.

One leg stretched toward the back of the cave, the other reaching forward and behind him, held supported and suspended, caught in the midst of an awkward, backward stride. His face showed clearly between his shoulder blades, for now, but the same little mouths who would soon find the blood would find his eyes, and his tongue, and the expression of abject horror he now wore would be lost to time.

Knowing this, in the pocket of his shirt, Hannibal had left a picture. A Polaroid, from the camera Will had bought in Mexico while they both healed, and changed, and left behind any remnants of their shared chrysalis.

In the white space on the bottom, he had written:

_Così s'osserva in me lo contrapasso_

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you all so much for reading 💗
> 
> To be sure I’m being totally fair I feel the need to mention I am a primarily Teen Wolf author at the moment, so there won’t be any new incoming Hannibal fic from me for quite awhile, but I’m sure there will be eventually.


End file.
